“Let’s make it two volumes.” After I was awarded this prize, during a revision meeting, one of the editors brought this suggestion. The unrevised manuscript was too full of words and details, swollen up like a balloon about to burst.
This was not something I had wished for, but if I had to produce twice as many pages, I would be able to go to places that I couldn’t have gone before. Characters I wasn’t able to include before would be able to appear. In fact, I found I’d been blessed by the opportunity to write about the interior of Amputation, the Tower Capital, Iris, and the Seven Generals.
The settings I had prepared to flesh out the world began to come out smoothly after that, and the history of my fictional world started to hang together almost too well. The characters began to speak almost by themselves.
Of course, there’s not really any kind of truly mystical, automatic writing process, and in reality I found myself stuck quite frequently, puzzling over my work many times. But it would always answer my efforts. If I really tried to rack my brains, the world would reward me with a proportional number of ideas. That’s how I thought about it, anyway.
Writing a novel really is fun.
I had a few more pages than I expected, so I hurried to append the epilogue in the final chapter as a little extra. So, to be honest, I’m still not sure whether or not I’ll be able to put the showdown between Dill and Lycaon, the encounter between Nue and Nui, or the selection exam taken by Sid and Dean into a book.
But writing this was fun. The story will continue, and it will expand even beyond the pages. It will even leave me, the author, behind. The characters are real. Just like children surpass their parents, they will surpass me.
Incidentally, today—the day I am writing this afterword—is March 11th, 2021. Ten years ago, I was in high school, attending a preparatory school in the Greater Tokyo Area. When the eerie morning earthquake warning shook the study room, I crawled underneath my desk, thinking to myself: no way am I biting the dust here. As I thought about how I would become a novelist, I waited for the tremors to subside.
Ten years have passed since then. Fortunately, I was completely unharmed, and no one close to me was seriously harmed either. However, given that such events happen, people never know when they may die. I etched into my mind the idea that I had to write my novel at once.
I still don’t really think that my dream from ten years ago has been granted—I still haven’t written nearly enough. Even now, my dream is still to become a novelist.